


The Southern Cross

by AgentCoop



Category: Banana Fish (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Death, Gen, M/M, Mutual Pining, Mutually Unrequited, Not something else, Poetry, Smoking, Stars, The southern cross as in constellation, Vietnam War, Violence, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-09
Updated: 2020-07-09
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:02:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25155937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AgentCoop/pseuds/AgentCoop
Summary: Griff, Max, and Vietnam.
Relationships: Griffin Callenreese & Max Lobo
Comments: 17
Kudos: 21





	The Southern Cross

The sky is different in ‘Nam.

Max and Griff lie under it, staring up into vast space at constellations they’ve never seen before. They don’t say a single word.

Bombs fall in the distance and they can hear the echo of them, just like they can feel the distant rumble through the ground.

Max raises an arm, pointing a finger towards the stars.

“There?” Griff asks.

“Yeah. I think that’s the Southern Cross.”

“How do you know this shit?”

“I’m a genius.”

“Fuck that.” Griff reaches up too, trying to follow Max’s finger with his own. “Still don’t see it. You’re full of shit.”

Max scooches over, so close that Griff can feel his breath at his own neck. He closes his eyes just for a second.

Then Max’s fingers wrap around his wrist.

“Here,” Max says, pulling Griff’s hand up a bit. “Those ones. Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta.” He moves Griff’s hand ever so slightly with each star, tracing the outline of the cross.

“How apropos.”

“Huh?”

“The names of your stars, ___genius___. Alpha, Delta, army alphabet and shit”

“Tch.” Max lets his hand drop, then scoots back to where he’d been laying just seconds ago. “Anyway. It’s there. Pretty sweet, yeah?”

“Pretty sweet,” Griff echoes.

Another bomb drops and the horizon lights in hazy purple orange for just a moment. There’s a sick feeling inside Griff’s chest and he tries to swallow it down before it creeps up to his throat and suffocates him.

“You should write a poem,” Max says.

His voice has taken on a dreamy quality now, and Griff turns his head just far enough to watch as a small smile curves on his lips.

“About stars,” Max continues. “They’re just as beautiful in this hell swamp as they were at home. They don’t change.”

“Or I could write a poem about death.”

“Or you could write a poem about stars.”

“How romantic,” Griff says.

Max doesn’t have a chance to respond. The alarm starts to blare, they both jump up, Griff grabs his helmet and slams it on his head so fast he can almost ignore the coil of fear that winds tight in his belly.

***

When the plane lands, there’s an order to things before the chaos begins.

The men exit, they salute, they follow other men, they salute again.

There are barracks, and there are medical tents, and there’s a mess hall that looks almost exactly like the mess hall back at training camp that served powdered eggs and microwaved sausage patties.

It’s just familiar enough that Griff can breathe without panicking.

The heat is oppressive, the humidity causes sweat to burn your eyes and run down the curve of your neck and it never stops.

Max tells him that in California, the sweat would dry on your body and rub off as salt. That it was irritating as fuck, going for a run and trying to scrub all that shit off your body.

Griff laughs, but it sounds forced. He’s carrying an M60 machine gun standard issue and it’s heavy enough that it’s taking most of his concentration.

Max tells him about how he’s gotta girl back in California with blonde hair and blue eyes and she lets him kiss her sometimes, and she smells real, real good.

Max talks a lot.

Griff sees two men die on their first mission, shot down right in front of him. One falls silently. The other clutches a hand to his throat, blood seeping out from a bullet straight to the jugular.

That one takes a long time to die.

Two nights later, they are camped out in the middle of the jungle and Griff dreams about the sharp, wet sucking sound the man makes as he fights for breath.

When he wakes up, he reaches for his gun, fingers aching for the cold brush of metal.

“Let’s kill some fuckers,” their commander says.

***

Griff is good at killing.

Max is not.

Max pukes the first time, and pukes the second time, and pukes the third time and the entire unit laughs at him.

Griff shoots a kid in the face and doesn’t look back.

***

He starts smoking.

They’ve got rations, but if you’re good at poker, then you’re flush in smokes and Max is fucking great at poker.

Sometimes they return from a shitty mission and only half their team is dead. They get showers. Griff washes blood from his face and blood from his neck, but can never get the blood out from under his nails.

Max still talks a lot, but Griff doesn’t mind so much anymore.

Max talks because he’s scared and he’s scared because he’s human. He’s scared because he’s ___real___.

Griff’s throat gets tighter and tighter every day and sometimes he’s worried that he’ll just stop breathing all together and will still get up and grab his gun and shoot down anyone who moves. Sometimes he’s worried he’s more animal than human.

So he smokes, and he writes, and he watches Max smile, and he ignores the way it makes something inside of him clench tight.

***

Griff’s squatting in the corner of a blown out shack, scratching words into paper that’s too damp to hold the graphite.

“You ever send those to someone?” Max asks, leaning against the sagging wall. “The poems, I mean.”

“Sometimes.”

“Your brother?”

“Sometimes.”

“Can I?”

Griff hands over the paper and watches as Max holds it close, trying to make out the sentences in the flickering light of the campfire outside.

“Stars,” he says with a grin. “You wrote about stars.”

Griff shrugs.

“It’s beautiful.”

“Yeah, well, it’s worthless.”

“You’re really talented.”

“Take it. You can send it to your girl. Tell her I send my best from the fucking swamp.”

Max doesn’t say anything.

Griff stands, and Max shuffles closer, and they fall into an easy silence that’s worth more to Griff than he thinks Max will ever know.

“I wish I were more like you,” Max whispers.

Griff doesn’t say anything, but his fingers clench tight.

“I’m so scared all the time. But you just...you get it. You go out, you get the job done. Fuck. I don’t know.”

“I’m a monster,” Griff says. His fingernails are cutting into the palms of his hands and he wishes it felt more painful than it does. He looks over at Max but refuses to meet his eyes. There’s sweat dripping down the curve of Max’s throat.

“Fuck.” Max kicks at a piece of stone. It doesn’t move. “That’s not what I meant.”

“It’s cool.”

“It’s not.”

Outside the building, the fire crackles, and Griff thinks about how easy a target the flame makes them, and how little he cares.

“If I don’t get out of here–”

“Fuck that shit,” Griff says. “You know we don’t do that.”

“Yeah.” Max laughs sheepishly, but it almost sounds like a sob.

It’s hot, but Griff steps even closer until they’re right up side by side, until his arm is brushing against Max’s arm, until he can almost hear Max’s heartbeat as it lines up with his own.

***

The drugs are good.

The drugs make it so he feels something again.

He can’t write for shit on them, but it doesn’t matter because he can smile, he can cry, he can scream, he can sleep without the faces of boys he’s killed grinning down with bloody teeth.

Max asks him to stop.

Griff tells him to fuck off.

Max doesn’t ask again.

There’s an unspoken pact out here in the jungle that you do what you need to do to get to the next day and so no one cares.

Griff’s lost count of the number of bodies he’s left in his wake. Sometimes he laughs about how many he’s killed.

It’s nothing.

Pointing a gun and pulling the trigger is easier than writing poetry.

***

There are no bombs tonight.

They lay together watching the stars, and the dirt under their backs is just as hot as it was during the day.

Max reaches over and takes Griff’s hand. He doesn’t point it towards the stars. He doesn’t say anything.

He just grips tightly.

Griff blinks haziness from his eyes and thinks he can make out the Southern Cross.

He thinks he tries to smile.

**Author's Note:**

> Follow me on [Twitter](http://twitter.com/agentcoop1)  
> 


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